The story takes place in the Montreal, Quebec apartment of Hosanna, a drag queen dressed as Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra, and centres on the relationship between her and Cuirette, an aging "stud" and gay biker, after they have returned from a Halloween party.
[1] It became the first Canadian play about and starring a drag queen when it was performed at Théâtre de Quat'Sous in Montreal in 1973.
The scholar and activist Viviane Namaste has criticized Hosanna, which ends with its protagonist identifying as a gay man after a series of humiliations, as reinforcing a patriarchal, transphobic ideology in which a "reliance on the ideas of illusion, deception, and betrayal presupposes that we as transgendered people do not know who we are.
A Tron Theatre production of a translation of the play into contemporary Scots by Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman was staged as part of Glasgow Mayfest in 1991.
[4] A 2021 production staged at Cabaret Mado in Montreal starred Tracy Trash as Hosanna.